IMDb Top 250 Data Contributors for 2018

Included below is our end-of-year message to IMDb's top 250 data contributors for 2018.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to IMDb -- every data contribution helps. If anyone outside of the top 250 would like to know their 2018 (only) live item total and position in the complete list, please post a reply here and, for a limited time, we will try to let you know.

Welcome to the 24th edition of our letter to recognise and
celebrate IMDb’s top data contributors of the year, which is again being sent
to everyone who contributed data in 2018. If this is your first time reading, I
am IMDb’s Founder & CEO and you can catch up on old editions of the letter here, as
well as follow IMDb’s future progress in our press room. We
passed a number of milestones in 2018 – 20 years as a subsidiary of Amazon.com
in April, the 25th anniversary of the launch of our first web site
in the summer, and our 28th birthday online in October. It has been
quite a year and we are grateful for all of your support. Thank you.

IMDb is built by you, our data contributors, so we want to thank each
and every one of you for helping us to grow in another record year, whether you
added just one item or whether you were #1 in the top contributor list below. Throughout
the year we have worked on making it easier for you to contribute, to process your
updates quickly, to be more consistent with our policies, and we started to provide
a real-time status on all pending updates (see the new contribution
history beta test).

Earlier this year Amazon’s Jeff Bezos wrote about people’s ever
increasing expectations in his annual
letter to shareholders - this has particularly resonated
with us as we strive to improve IMDb for both our contributor community and our
hundreds of millions of monthly visitors worldwide. We are building more new
features as well as making existing features more consistently available across
all of IMDb’s websites and mobile applications to try to exceed your
expectations. We are always thrilled when we are able to bring IMDb to new
devices and services; you never know where something you have contributed may
appear next.

The Numbers

The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved,
non-duplicate data items which the Top 250 have contributed in 2018, including
corrections and deletions. New records
have been set in terms of the total number of contributors (600,000+) and
overall volume. Yet we still managed to achieve further reductions in the time
between submission and publication.

IMDb now includes:

·
Over 5.6 million titles with over 700,000 added in
2018

·Over 9.5 million names with over 750,000 added in
2018

·Over 105 million filmography credits with over 14
million added in 2018

Over 14,000 items were required for you to make it onto the Top 250 list
this year.

Progress

... From a contributor perspective by
Thomas Porter ...

Looking back at the changes over the past year is always a
pleasure. Sharing the improvements with you, a real privilege. Whether you’re a
dedicated archivist, industry professional or armchair critic, your content
helps power careers and settle viewing decisions (and bets) the world over.
Significantly, it’s not just visitors to IMDb’s websites and apps who benefit.
Today IMDb’s content is helping to reinvent the video-watching experience via
Prime Video’s X-Ray for Movies & TV and power entertainment-related answers
via Amazon’s Alexa. Your contributions can have an enormously wide reach, one
that is expanding fast.

With that in mind, for IMDb’s Content team, 2018 will be
remembered as the year we started to get serious about structured,
international data. Having the right answers at the right time in multiple
languages, and presenting them in a way that makes sense in text, voice and
other media formats has been a big focus and we’re hugely grateful for everyone
who has been involved so far. Many of you have been adding international title
text for years (thank you) and we were pleased to roll-out a well-received
policy change to enable us to collect even more locale-specific
title information. We also launched language
and country-specific tagging for posters. Check out these versions
of the Avengers:
Infinity War (2018) poster, tagged with Portuguese
and Hebrew.

Elsewhere we’re still laser-focused on making it easier for you to
contribute. In 2018 we launched brand new contribution interfaces for User
Reviews on apps and our mobile site, and for Title
FAQs on our regular desktop site. For the latter we’re now open to
submissions of questions without answers to encourage those that do know to
help those that don’t. We also launched a new Data
Gaps feature to surface missing key title content including
runtimes, release dates and plots. We’d love to hear your feedback on new
contribution initiatives like this, so please do give it a whirl.

Speed of service continues
to be a major focus. In 2018, a record-breaking number of your contributions
were processed within minutes, most within hours, and 95% of everything within
24hrs. For the remaining 5%, we work around the clock to ensure no contribution
sits around for more than 5 days. Our customer service speed has also
accelerated. Over the year 95% of your contacts were handled within 24 hours on
Get Satisfaction and via the new-for-2018 IMDb
Help Center (helping scores of you find answers without having to
contact us – the speediest type of service there is).

Last but certainly not least, in 2018 we’ve had more direct
contact with a wider array of contributors than ever. Our help community on Get
Satisfaction is still the place to keep abreast of the latest feature
announcements and have your say on content policy changes (see these recent
discussions on Company
names and writer
credits, for example). Our new ventures into internationalization,
however, have led us to many new contributors from across the globe and we’ve
been blown away with the willingness and enthusiasm to get involved (special
shout out to janusminoa and ljdoncel,
you rock!). We even ended the year with a face-to-face contributor event in
Mumbai. Col Needham and several of the team attended and had a blast – thank
you for hosting us, India!

If you’re keen to get involved in new initiatives, please do make
yourself known on Get Satisfaction. We’d love
to work with you.

On behalf of IMDb’s Content team, thank you, thank you, thank you
to our Get Satisfaction
Champs, our localization participants, our Beta testers and to each
and every one of our contributors. Huge congratulations if you made the top 250
this year.

Happy New Year everyone, see you in 2019!

Thomas Porter
Manager - IMDb Database Content

... From a customer perspective by
Col Needham ...

This is an exciting time to be a fan of movies and TV (and related
visual media) because we are living in a golden era of choice and convenience:
it has never been easier for people to tell stories on-screen and it has also never
been easier for audience members to watch this content. We love connecting storytellers to their
audience and we love it when you, our customers, find something great to watch
via a search, recommendation or other IMDb feature. As technology advances we always look to
provide new ways to access IMDb on more devices. When we launched back in 1990, the ability to
search IMDb by voice would have seemed like something from a science
fiction movie, yet this is now a common experience with IMDb
helping to power entertainment queries on Alexa (and recently not only in English). We
will continue to help you to get answers for all your entertainment questions,
to watch wisely and
to share your passion for
entertainment with other IMDb customers worldwide.

On a related worldwide note, India is
now our #2 country by size of our active user base, behind the US at #1 and
replacing the UK (now at #3). I am just
back from my first-ever visit to India with some of the team in December and it
was an honour to meet our top contributors and industry professionals there. In
support of our international expansion, we also recently added Hindi and
Turkish translations to fixed labels within the IMDb Android app. Look for more locally
relevant content across IMDb wherever you are located in 2019.

We have continued to produce a variety of own video content and what
better way to find a list of it than using an IMDb
advanced search. In
particular, we have spun-off features from The IMDb Show
including IMDbrief. The IMDb Studio filmed interviews at The
Sundance Film Festival, The Oscars, South by Southwest, The Cannes Film
Festival, San Diego Comic-Con, The Toronto International Film Festival, The
Emmys and New York Comic-Con.

We followed our 2017 technology migration with a regular cycle of site updates both
behind-the-scenes and visible to you. Updates included user reviews, lists,
advanced title search, https support and a new video player.

For entertainment industry customers we offer IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo. On
IMDbPro we launched a new
design of the main pages based upon extensive customer
research; we added many features to the iOS app; we launched an Android
app; we are especially pleased with the launch of
IMDbPro Track allowing
you to be notified when people or titles in which you are interested appear in
the news. IMDbPro is also proud to be able to support the ReFrame
initiative.

We have an exciting 2019 planned and we look forward to serving you
better whenever and wherever you access IMDb.
If you would like to join our team or have friends or contacts with the
very particular set of skills we
are seeking, please keep an eye on our jobs page where we are regularly
recruiting in the UK (Bristol, London) and US (Seattle, LA, NYC).

Thanks and Feedback

In recognition of your contributions, as usual, we are offering the Top
250 contributors free access to IMDbPro for 2019 which will activate / renew automatically
when they next visit IMDbPro and
login.

Thanks again for all your support during the year. As always, ideas and
constructive feedback are welcome via Get Satisfaction,
where you can also propose and vote upon ideas, specifically including: IMDb, data, iOS, Android or IMDbPro.

Thrilled to be back in the top 250 for the 3rd consecutive year. However, this year was the most challenging of all to make, I have to admit.The question if I have done enough to contribute to the site, enough to make it into the top 250 again rears it's ugly head in the year's closing weeks.I would like to propose the possibility, for all contributors, to have a personal counter in their page (only for them to see?) that keeps track of the validated contributions. Would this be a possiblity?

A continuously updated contribution counter has been a long-term suggestion and it is on the list of ideas for consideration, however, it currently requires a significant amount of computational power to produce the end-of-year lists so it is not an easy fix. At least technology gets faster every year though so stay tuned ...

Thanks you. This year is the first time that i am a top contibutor (164). I am very happy.
I invite everyone to update the best webpage about cinema and television.
From Spain, happy new year to everybody.

FYI, my "Lifetime Total" on my profile page https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0301684/ was 50,000+ at the beginning of 2018, and it is now 75,000+. But one cannot deduce anything from that, because 50,000+ could be anything between 50,000 and 74,999.

Hello! Can someone check the complete number of my submissions? It shows
15801 and I didn't enter in Top 250? I know that's not the real number,
some of them might not be admitted and 'admonitions' have more item
included. Until what hour the items were included in the year 2017? I
put a lot of effort, please check again. Thank you for being here in
this day.

Sir, read my plea. In September, when my items - the counter 1... 10,000 - added were around 8,5000 this page https://www.imdb.com/user/ur34458014/ showed 10,0000. So, you are tell me that between September and almost New Year's midnight I was only accepted with 966 items. You saying that almost 5,000 items added by me were not approved, duplicate... although the items that I put can be found on the site. Could you give me an example of my 'duplicate data'?

No, sorry, we are not saying that at all. What we are saying is that our count and your count will always be different, not just from September.

The count on the badges is something slightly different too. Your own count, the badge count and the end-of-year counts are counting similar things, however, they are not counting exactly the same things, primarily because of the way IMDb works; for example, multiple people may send the same data at approximately the same time and that would create differences between the three numbers; or existing live data may be edited or even deleted by someone else.

Sir, if it will take me the hole year, I will check every submission that I made. That impossible. My page shows 10,000 added, so where are the rest 5,801 items? There all multiple / edited by someone else ...? At least, can you point what was the my last contribution admitted. Anyway, something should be done for a contributor to see before he add an item that it is already proceed.

This was our great pleasure to have you in Mumbai for the first ever IMDb meet-up event which took place on December 11, 2018. I thank you and your team on behalf of the IMDb India data contributors for giving 19 of us the opportunity to meet you and your team and learn so much about the history of this organization.

On this occasion, I would love to share this group photo of you, your team, special guest Zachary Coffin and the 19 IMDb India data contributors, which was taken that day during the event.

One more thing I would to like to request, a real-time (or updated once a day) list which will show the total/daily/monthly/yearly approved data count. That feature will be very much helpful to the contributors in the race to make it to the Top 250 year end contributors list.

Col, it's been a great while since I had to ask (https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0862605/), but what are my numbers for 2018?Kudos for everybody who has made the list this year! Also, very nice to hear of the contributor meet-up in India!

Thanks Col. I don't know why I didn't get the mail (in my email preferences I've opted for "Send me emails from the following categories" and not "Do not send me informational emails"), but I see I also received the badge for 2018, so I'm fine. By the way, I don't think the badges were ever added this fast!